The 'living archive' for Tactical Media's present, past and future.

Search results for 'politics'

The American military network ARPAnet was conceived as a way to maintain
uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear war. Ancestor of
the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure,
ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the "push­button war"
that lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th
century discoveries in physics, within an industrial society capable of
organizing the productivity - including the scientific productivity - of
thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is the real birthplace of the
information society: a society massively penetrated by the sciences and
technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to carry
out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with
design replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the
knowledge of the real, that is to say, the transformation of reality
into information. A society whose governmentality unfolds between its
smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic, magnetic, genetic,
chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet, solar
system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its
productivity, means, and possible destinies.

At first glance the concept of "organised networks" appears oxymoronic.
In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders,
administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles.
Think also back to the early work on cybernetics and the "second order"
cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations
whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the "constitutive
outside" of feedback or noise.[1] The order of networks is made up of a
continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and
pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is
never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual
fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing
to function as political agents.

Bank of America executives, investors, and opponents alike reacted with
surprise to yesterday's news - posted for two hours on Dow Jones Newswire
and elsewhere - that the mammoth financial institution, realizing it was
heading for a taxpayer bailout, was asking Americans to start thinking
about what they'll do with the bank once they own it, and to start
advertising that vision too.

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that
bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of
Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back
then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There
was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed
behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of
people."- Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

LaSapienza University - Happening about education, welfare and new
political practices - In the last two years we have participated and
assisted with extraordinary movements that have fought for a quality
education, for labor rights and new welfare against the austerity
politics of the European Union. The wild demonstrations, pickets lines
and strikes, the university occupations and the turmoil of the
Mediterranean signal a generational revolt and the necessity of a new
social pact that involves all those subjects that stand up for their
rights and refuse to be blackmailed.

A corporate media group has trade-marked the phrase "Radical Media" and
is trying to ban Peace news, New Internationalist, Red Pepper and
others from using it in the title of a conference?

Following a recent Diary item in the Guardian, indymedia is today
reporting on the story that a corporate media group has forced us to
change the name of our conference. Readers are invited to attend a
demonstration outside @Radical Media's London office, Tuesday, 3rd May
2011, 5pm, London W1T 7AA.

WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means
by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least
four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are
fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear.

We would like you to read this document and respond to this idea. It
was our wish and motivation to consider a format which could
accommodate certain situations in which countries and cultures find
themselves in these days. Ever increasingly, we are witnessing the
phenomena of ruined nation states, crashing financial markets and
bankrupt governments. So far, this is only interpreted in the usual
journalistic way of reporting the political and financial aspects of
the crises. But we, cultural workers, know better. It is only perceived
as 'news'. Arts and culture in this situation are the last to be
considered contemporary, sensitive instruments that could express the
'signs of the times'. First of all culture is a prime target of budget
cuts and this has become the only language in which officials can
speak. Art, by definition, is always in a defensive role and cannot
make demands. We do not like to further the culture of complaint, nor
is this the right time to dream up new utopias. We propose to radically
face current global economic forces. We want to intervene in their
sphere. Culture should not be left out: condemned to compensate for and
be at the receiving end of this trauma.

The attack on the World Trade Center was--among other things--a stunning media event, and there was no shortage of analysis on mass media coverage. We saw no reason to replicate what others were doing. What no one seemed to be looking at closely was the significance of this ephemeral material that filled the streets and parks in New York below 14th Street or its relationship with the new media that was also flooding our lives.

While the uprising in Egypt caught most observers of the Middle East
off guard, it did not come out of the blue. The seeds of this
spectacular mobilization had been sown as far back as the early 2000s
and had been carefully cultivated by activists from across the
political spectrum, many of these working online via Facebook, twitter,
and within the Egyptian blogosphere. Working within these media,
activists began to forge a new political language, one that cut across
the institutional barriers that had until then polarized Egypt's
political terrain, between more Islamicly-oriented currents (most
prominent among them, the Muslim Brotherhood) and secular-liberal ones.

This is a short text [1] which appears in "Public Netbase: Non Stop Future. New Practices in Art and Media" edited by the fine people at the New Media Center_kuda.org, in cooperation with World-Information Institute / t0. This book was presented at Transmediale 2009 in Berlin.http://nonstop-future.org

Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self- aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass medium (1995-2005).

The antiwar demonstrations of February 15, 2003 proved it: theself-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetaryscale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In amanifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used thelanguage of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create arift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the greattransnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financialdisasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command ofthe earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted toencourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of theAmerican, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment thathad multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing thetraditional mechanisms of representation.